Third-party cloud management tools do the trick

The media and entertainment company Hungama Digital adopted Amazon’s cloud services for hosting
and running its content delivery infrastructure in 2008. With the cloud service, came a set of cloud
management tools, which, through a console, let Hungama manage its cloud usage. While the
console monitored server load and network traffic, it did not monitor cloud usage for a finer set
of parameters and generate alerts in case of issues.

More resources on cloud management tools

So Hungama Digital deployed an open-source third-party cloud management tools Nagios and Cacti
for monitoring and managing its cloud service. With the help of Nagios cloud management tool
and some shell scripts written in-house, the company is able to monitor CPU cycle and performance,
memory and disk consumption, etc, using a single-cloud management console.

With Cacti cloud management tool, Hungama can track resource requirements for applications at
various points of time and thus plan future resource provisioning.

For instance, Vikram Raichura, MD of Viva Infomedia, a provider of information products and
services, has been using Netmagic’s cloud computing services since 2009. He explains, “While the
proprietary management console met most of our cloud management requirements, Nagios cloud
management tool helped us to generate alerts every time an exception occurred. The exceptions could
include, for instance, CPU usage reaching threshold levels or even ping loss.”

More and more brokers

About the increasing demand for third-party cloud management tools, Sid Deshpande, Senior
Research Analyst at Gartner says, “Enterprise customers are asking service providers for more
visibility to manage their IT infrastructure.”

Cloud service customers want the flexibility to move applications and data from their one cloud
to another in case of termination of a contract or in case the customer moves to another vendor.
This becomes an issue with lock-in policies of cloud service providers.

This is also where a cloud service broker’s cloud management tools come in. A cloud service
broker provides cloud management tools i.e. applications or components that are developed based on
application programming interfaces (APIs) made public by cloud service providers. These
applications exploit the APIs
to provide cloud management tools that go beyond provisioning, monitoring, and metering.

Gartner categorizes the third party cloud management tools vendors, i.e. cloud service brokers,
based on the type of applications they provide. For example, an aggregation broker provides
a single interface which brings together multiple cloud services for billing and metering,
monitoring, single sign on and value added services. A customization broker provides
capabilities on top of existing cloud services through some cloud management tools. A governance
broker provides a cloud management tool to track, measure, monitor, and enforce policies across
interactions. It can be used for access and authorization management, creating and managing user
profiles.

It should be mentioned here that the third party cloud management tools, however, may not
replace the proprietary cloud management tools. They will merely provide add-on management
functionalities based on the specific customer requirements that the cloud service vendors cannot
offer.

Vendor specific extensions

Of late, a few traditional products and services vendors have also entered cloud management
tools business. For example, Riverbed (through its Whitewater offering) and Citras (through
Bluejet) offer cloud storage software appliances or gateways which interface between internal and
external cloud storage environments.

Hungama Digital already uses one such cloud management tool. Dipankar Sinha, Project
Manager - Infrastructure and Hosting at Hungama.com informs, “We use a web interface provided by
Amazon to upload our content on Amazon’s S3 storage. However, the proprietary web interface limits
the amount of data that can be transferred. Therefore, to upload data in terabytes, we use
third-party cloud management tools such as S3Fox and S3upload.”

Degrees of variation

The management requirements of cloud customers across industries could vary. They could get
granular for different areas. Customers from different industries may ask for specific management
features in the cloud management tools provided by a broker.

Here’s a list of cloud service brokers and what they have to offer:

Cloud service broker (brand)

Cloud management tool

What it does

3scale

3scale Connect and 3scale Enterprise

An API management solution that offers a library that programmers use to gain
low-level control over the authentication and handling of requests

A front-end to RRDTool, it uses the necessary information to create and maintain
graphs, data sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database. Supports SNMP for creating traffic
graphs with Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)

CloudSwitch

CloudSwitch Enterprise

Enables enterprise IT organizations to migrate applications to (and from) the
public cloud without infrastructure changes

Kaavo

Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand (IMOD)

Provides n-tier, application-centric management of resources for public and private
cloud. Supports tools such as Nagios and Zabbix. IMOD supports Amazon and Rackspace public cloud
environments, as well as Eucalyptus

Makara

Cloud Application Platform

A hosted service, it provides portability across different hypervisors (VMware ESX,
VMware Workstation, VirtualBox and Xen) and public cloud environments